Album review: Love Is All Mixed Up by Love Is All Modern Swedish music seems to be making quite a splash recently, with bands such as Shout Out Louds, The Knife and the confusingly-titled I’m From Barcelona all making the jump across the North Sea. Love Is All made that same journey in 2006 with their debut album Nine Times That Same Song, sounding like a happy mixture of The Go! Team, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and with a little bit of The Pixies added in. Mixed Up, as the name might suggest, is a remix album done by artists such as Metronomy and Hot Chip. So how does it fare?Quite well, really. Leaving almost nothing of the original, each remix takes the track in a totally new musical direction, from the synth-laden sound of Maps’ version of ‘Turn The Radio Off’ to the danceable beats of ‘Spinning and Scratching’, Metronomy style. However, one or two tracks drag, with some overly long running times for no apparent reason. Particularly guilty of this is Studio’s remix of ‘Turn The Radio Off’, which stretches the same idea over ten minutes and bizarrely features the riff from Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’. Opening track ‘Felt Tip’, remixed by Fyars, is passable, but pales in comparison to Hot Chip’s take on the same song, which has a much more ambient feel than most of the album, while still managing to be cheery and upbeat. Admittedly, the general electro theme does get a bit tiring, especially when many tracks have a fairly repetitive style.Mixed Up provides a refreshing new look at old songs, and is well accomplished in its own right. Fans of the original may miss the fast-paced intensity, but there is such a variety of styles on this album that most will find at least a few tracks to enjoy.
Four stars.
Thomas Barrett
Greater than its parts
